Planting Guide For Zone 8b: Let's Get Ready For Spring!

It seems like just yesterday that we were talking about winterizing your home for freezing temperatures, and here we are writing a planting guide for spring! Well, we still have some of those freezing temps coming our way, but now is the perfect time to start planning out your spring landscaping so that you’re ready to go when the weather turns. So here is our ultimate planting guide for Zone 8b!

What Does A Planting Guide For Zone 8b Mean?

The USDA has established 13 zones across the US that have a certain range of hardiness (based on factors like temperature and moisture) that give home gardeners a good idea of which plants will survive and thrive in their area. Southern Oregon falls right in the middle, at zone 8.

This planting guide for zone 8b will help you navigate which plants will not only look gorgeous surrounding your home, but will survive and thrive in our climate!

Why Is It Important To Follow A Planting Guide for Zone 8b?

Firstly, landscaping around your home just looks great! It offers a homeowner a sense of pride and accomplishment when the beauty of the exterior of their home matches the beauty of all the laughs, meals, gatherings and wonderful memories made in the interior of their home. Plus, gardening is great for your health! We could go on and on about the positive effects of putting that green thumb to good use, but to summarize all the good stuff: it looks beautiful, increases the pride of homeownership, reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression, boosts your immune responses and cognitive functioning, and has even been proven to increase your sense of community and overall well being! That’s a lot of good stuff.

But wait, there’s more! Landscaping your home is one of the easiest ways to boost your home value and see a greater return on investment than many other home projects (more on that in our upcoming blog post, Upgrades That Add Value To Your Home). In fact, HomeGuides.com says, “A well-landscaped home has a significant price advantage over a home with no landscaping. This advantage ranges from 5.5 percent to 12.7 percent depending on the type of landscaping and the home's original value. That translates into an extra $16,500 to $38,100 in value on a $300,000 home.”

The very first thing a potential buyer will see driving up to your home is the setting. And if they love what they see, it can mean a significant increase in value and higher chances of receiving a solid offer.

So, now that we have convinced you how valuable it is to have a beautiful landscape surrounding your home, let’s get into our complete planting guide for zone 8b.

Planting Guide For Zone 8b By Month:

DECEMBER - LATE FEBRUARY
The months of Dec-Feb are considered “frost” months, and you are unlikely to get a lot of good growth from anything you plant outdoors. Perennials can survive in these months, but only if they are mature and have been previously planted, and even then it’s a good idea to keep them covered in a warm layer of mulch. 

Sowing seeds for an herb garden in January is unlikely to yield you any significant harvest come spring and summer unless you start your plants inside. Many seasoned gardeners use January as the month to start seeds for cruciferous and leafy green vegetables, as well as flowers and herbs that have a long germination period, like rosemary, snapdragons or begonias.

Some good things to do during “frost months” are to prep yourself for the spring: gather, clean and sharpen your gardening tools, prune trees and shrubs, shape your existing shrubs, make a plan for which shrubs, flowers, and vegetables you want to plant, and get your power tools (like your lawn mower or weed eater to get serviced before the warm weather sets in.

LATE FEBRUARY - EARLY MARCH

If you want to plant a vegetable garden, now is the perfect time to plant some of your hardier cool season vegetables like carrots, broccoli, kale, lettuce, onions, and spinach. Planting your veggies during the early months of the year will yield a great crop in summer and will also give you enough time to replant in the early fall and get a winter harvest as well.

There are a few varieties of flowers that can tolerate being planted in these colder months, and will bring a burst of color to your landscape in the spring! This is the perfect time to plant anemone, helleborus, black-eyed susan, clematis, columbine, daffodils, delphinium, gardenia, and honeysuckle. These blooms will provide fragrance, color, and food for bees and birds in early spring.

MARCH - APRIL

Keep a close eye on weather conditions, and try to resist planting until after you’ve seen the final frost. Now is the time to start planting potatoes, peas, celery, more carrots and lettuce. If a cold front moves in, try to cover new plantings with straw or gardening cover to keep them warm.

You can also sow seeds for hardier annual flowers such as larkspur, California poppies, and sweet peas!

APRIL - JUNE

This season is a gardeners paradise. There are so many flowers, vegetables, herbs, and trees that are flourishing and looking their absolute best in this sweet season. You should be seeing blooms from some of your earlier plantings, and enjoying lots of greenery appearing on your trees and shrubs!

You are free to plant the more delicate warm-weather vegetables such as tomatoes, cucumber, eggplant, bell peppers, squash, zucchini, and melons. You can also plant any and all of your favorite herbs!

Herbs are not only great for eating, they are also beneficial to your landscape. Many herbs like peppermint and lavender not only create beautiful, full texture in your garden, but they also smell wonderful and can help repel pests and insects.

A few of the herbs that will not only survive but thrive in zone 8 are basil, sage, lavender, mint, fennel, oregano, lemon balm, tarragon, thyme, chives, and eucalyptus.

You can spend these months planting the more tender annual flowers like impatiens, dahlias, hydrangea, salvia, and peonies.

JULY

Herbs and some vegetables such as beans, summer squash, peas, tomatoes and cucumbers will continue to grow throughout the summer. Some hardy flower varieties will continue to bloom in the summer as long as they have adequate water, shade, and fertilizer. A few beautiful blooms that do well throughout the summer in zone 8b are hibiscus, zinnias, sea holly, and petunias.

AUGUST - SEPTEMBER

Now is the time to plan for an autumn harvest! In your garden you should start planting your second round of peas, carrots, broccoli, kale and spinach. Cold-hardy vegetables that will provide you with a strong winter crop.

Your herbs should still be going strong if they have had adequate water, shade, and fertilizer during the warmer months! They will move past their flowering stage and enter a phase of mature leafy growth.

Once the nights start getting cooler, it’s the perfect time to plant fall flowers such as scilla, lady’s slipper orchids, hollyhock, foxglove, red hot poker (kniphofia), bear’s breech, and sunflowers.

Deadhead and prune your plants that have already finished blooming for the season to encourage healthy growth next year!

OCTOBER-NOVEMBER

It’s official, we are going into the winter months. You will start seeing the results of your last summer vegetable plantings, and you might start to see the final fruits of your herb garden for the year.

If you have perennial herbs and flowers you want to protect over the winter, make sure you are pruning back dead branches, covering roots with thick mulch or straw, adding compost to your garden, and keeping your flowers and vegetable beds weed free.

Fertilize plants such as roses, and get ready for most of your plants to go dormant.

Now is the time to start looking to next year! There are several plants that you can plant now in anticipation of the coming spring. Next year’s tulips, daffodils, hyacinth, and crocus can all be planted now in order to grow an established root system before the first frost. These little bulbs will provide you with the earliest hints of spring next year.

This is also a great time to start winterizing your home in other ways! Check out our winterizing blog post for more tips here.

We hope this planting guide to zone 8b was helpful as you gear up for the warmer months! It’s one of the best times of year— where we get to look forward to the future, have hope for the days ahead, and add some beauty to the world. Not to mention, improve our mental and physical wellbeing while we’re at it!

I don’t know about you, but we’re ready to get out there and get our hands dirty: let’s get ready for spring!